Automatic makes sense. It probably means something has to occur first before the PR is updated to the toolbar. So, it's not a schedule of time or 'x' amount of says. One thing that I can say is that a large delay is PR updates are usually associated with a major algorithm update. Google has the new caffeine infrastructure and you figure that they will do something with it. I guess Halloween. It's not likely that they will do anything a couple of months before the Christmas season.

The PR update could be triggered on a date or algorithm change to name a couple of possibilities. Do you ever notice that most of the PR updates fall around Holidays?

Originally Posted by Hellas

No copyrights = no monopoly, you would not discuss then about evil Google on that thread .

No copyrights = no monopoly isn't the way that I look at a monopoly. Take for example the case of the Netscape browser. At one point, Netscape was selling the browser for $100. A person working at McDonalds at the time would have needed to work one week after taxes to buy it. To make a long story short, Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer. Today, the consumer has many free choices including firefox and chrome.

Competition helps the little guy. Because, it provides incentive for producers to become more efficient and offer lower priced goods to the consumer. That's why we have a higher standard of living compared to the people that were living behind the 'Iron Curtain'.

Copryright protect your work, if you remove the copyrights then everyone could steal your work, simple as that.

Ah, you have gone right to the heart of everything.
Good explanation!

People on the net already steal and use copyrighted work.
This is when they either show it as their own work or never give the proper authorship.
See it all the time and see companies suing to have such material removed from websites.

Trademarks to a point are great to have.
Otherwise everyone would love to put a coke or pepsi sign on their site.
But it gets ridiculous on trademarks when so many companies trademark or try to trademark common words.
Most famously, Apple for apple. Though it is tightly written so that we can use apples and grow apples.

Patents are getting to be one of the biggest jokes in the US.
Physical patents are great to protect a particular product.
But this intellectual property patents are fooolish.
EG: a patent for some idea of how to sell products on the net.

Now back to google and page rank.
It is expected, but nothing writ in stone yet that I can find, that google will finally update page rank the last weekend of this month.
Will see.

Oh, as an aside, it is funny to see people sell sites and say something like "this site will be a page rank 4 at the next update".